


The story of Abbadon Tarzei

by ReinaZanahoria



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Augments are on a new planet, F/M, Khan is dom af, Khan is sexy af, OC credit to Revolutionary
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-22
Updated: 2017-11-29
Packaged: 2019-02-08 05:30:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12857784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ReinaZanahoria/pseuds/ReinaZanahoria
Summary: Khan must rebuild everything on a barren planet after Starfleet have stripped him of his ethnicity, his memories and most of his crew. He needs is old war general on his side. He needs her help to build his legacy.Abbadon Tarzei is fierce and a perfect match for Khan if it weren't for her traumatic memories of experiments in solitary confinement and her amnesia.





	1. Paperwork

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Revolutionary11](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Revolutionary11).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Starfleet have stripped Khan of his ethnicity, his power and most of his crew. Yet he is determined to build a new world on a barren planet and build a legacy with his ex-general of war, Abbadon Tarzei.  
> Her memories were also wiped by Starfleet, she struggles to be herself around the suspicious crew.

The fire flickered into existence, next to the large mouth of a lifeless river. A planet previously free of multicellular life felt the first flames that accompany humanity. The shadow of a muscular woman, hunched over a hunk of metal, danced on the sand. She had an expression too fierce to be the sort of woman one lightly called ‘pretty’ but her carved lips and eyes were not misshapen or unattractive.

Abaddon filed through the reports from the various stations by the campfire. The bird of prey was a few hundred yards away, sheltering a number of shacks from the wind. She could almost laugh, even here in this desolate end of the world, civilisation came down to paperwork. She didn’t care much for paperwork, but the work that needed to be done was engineering and she had never so much as seen an old engine, let alone an alien ship with warp capability.

She was a strategist at heart, and at the end of the day, reading reports was a task for a person who could visualize and strategize. The reports showed that there were months of work ahead of them. Abaddon knew that though augments were of superior intelligence, their factual knowledge ended three hundred years ago, prior to any recorded mention of Klingons. This work required a lot of taking apart before they could piece parts back together.

There was a distraction though, in the distance. A man whose posture made even mice sit up straight. Blue eyes that shone with ambition and cheekbones so sharp one would imagine them whistling as he marched by the site. For their entire first day, he had been standing by the work, leading the engineers, pushing them to recover the vessel. He had barely glanced at her. She knew his name was Khan, as she had seen the others call him by that name. She also knew that she should recognise him. He had given her the task of setting up camp, of starting the fire and assigning food gathering tasks. How he had recognised her ability to organize groups of men in survival situations, she did not know.

“Sorry for intruding, General Tarzei,” spoke a gruff male voice behind her, a woman in practical loose trousers and a shirt, “I’ve checked the surrounding areas for food. There’s nothing around but bacteria. We should be able to grow some crops from the little we salvaged. We also think we can reverse engineer a sort of molecular food dispenser from the ship.”

“Good job, private. Hand that in in writing next time.” She tried to go back to focusing on the reports.

“Corporal.”

She looked up. “Huh?”

“General Tarzei, I’m a corporal. Don’t you remember?” asked the young man.

No, she remembered nothing. These people were supposedly the only ones she could trust, but letting them know of her amnesia was too much of a risk.

She bluffed. “Being a general is busy. Rank is bullshit anyway, maybe I’ll respect you enough to remember that if you learn to disrespect the rules. You can’t break a bone if you can’t break rules.” That phrase came out of nowhere, but it felt right.

He laughed. “I was worried the old General wasn’t all there anymore. Glad to see you still got it.”

He wandered off. Abaddon wasn’t alone for long though. As the augments were clearing away their workstations, Khan left them to their simple tasks and followed the scent of meat roasting over the campfire.

“Tarzei!” he called as he strode over to her.

She looked up, noting down everything she noticed like she had since she got there. Cold reading everything she saw like a fake psychic picking up clues from the audience and passing it for memory.

He didn’t call her general, so they must have been close. He raised his hand to greet her, it felt friendly. They did not have an established physical relationship.

“How are you?” he asked, “I imagine twelve is easier to manage than twelve hundred thousand. This must almost be a holiday for you” He smiled and put his arm around her back as he sat down next to her. Her brain ran a million calculations, was that large warm hand a sign of friendship or had she miscalculated the existence of a physical relationship?

Things began to connect with the ‘General’ thing. “Yeah, better than the army. Being a war general is hard.” She glanced at him.

“If I recall, you asked for the job, so I’m not apologising for the workload,” he said, then he added slyly, “And you never relaxed. Even on your holidays. Like that last one when you ended up coaching a sports team… where did you go then?”

She shrugged, “Can’t remember.”

He frowned for a second, then seemed disappointed. He stood up. “Seriously Tarzei? You expect me to believe you just forgot your birth village?”

Her face flushed, she had no answer there. She stared at the floor.

He lowered his voice, which seemed impossible. “Tarzei. Don’t panic. My memory was wiped too, by Marcus. It comes back. You don’t have to hide from us.”

“I don’t want the others to know.”

“I think that’s stupid.”

“It might be. Please cover for me.”

He sighed, “I don’t know what you hope to achieve, but sure.” He sat back down next to her.

He stared at the fire, motionless. When he stayed still in that way he seemed to absorb the space around him for energy.

“What was the first thing that tipped my amnesia off to you?” asked Tarzei.

Khan mimicked her higher pitched voice, “Because I’m a war general, right? Right?” he laughed, “You’re the shittiest spy I’ve ever worked with. You have two or three intelligence gathering tricks and I know them off by heart. You’re a clever girl, Tarzei, but your social skills live in a different dimension to your leadership skills.”

“I thought I was doing okay.”

“That’s why you need my help.”


	2. Memories Return

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Augments argue about Khan's new accent and Abbadon gets hit by her first flashback.

Khan wiped a layer of dust off his forehead. He’d been hard at work all morning, helping the small team of augments move large pieces of machinery and welding pieces of metal together. He looked at the shadow of the bird of prey and saw it shortening. Luckily this barren planet had a similar day cycle to earth. It was approaching lunchtime. The meat they had cooked yesterday was most of the meat they had, there were no animals to hunt on the planet. There seemed to be large live edible insects and annelids in the Klingon ship, but Khan felt they should try to breed the animals before driving their main source of protein to extinction. So the lunch Abaddon had prepared was a massive pot of carrot and lentil soup.

After another half hour of gruelling work, Khan led the rest of the workers back to the camp for lunch and rest.

“Good work, men,” he said, sitting down on a large flat rock. Abaddon poured out large helpings of soup to the hungry men.

A young man with black shoulder-length hair looked up from his bowl of soup. “Hey, Leader Khan, I get that Starfleet made you a white boy, but what’s with the accent?”

“Shut up, Jasmeet,” said Khan, “We all know there isn’t a surgery in the world that would make you sound civilized.”

Joachim joined in with the ribbing, “Hey, I think it makes him kinda sexy, I’ve just got this stupid American accent. Not quite as authoritative as that low growl.”

Khan laughed, he had missed the comradery of war. He did wonder about Joachim though, if Abby was amnesiac, did that mean he was too?

“I have to admit, the weirdest part of all this is your haircuts. Even General Tarzei has a bob now. Is the future somehow against thick long hair?” said Jasmeet. The rest of the crew murmured and laughed in agreement as they slurped their soup down.

Abbadon frowned, “I think shorter hair is more practical in the army.”

“Clearly you know nothing of Sikh warriors,” said Khan. He scraped at his bowl with a brightly coloured but practical spork (It was the most efficient cutlery they could find on the ship). “With our hair tied up in a turban, it serves both as armour and a crown. It’s also a statement of independence and respect for our own bodies. I suspect Starfleet intended to insult me by cutting my hair.”

Abbadon wanted to reply, but a buzzing filled her ears. She stared at Khan, a light seemed to be flashing on and off behind him. She couldn’t see his mouth clearly and the way shapes were distorting, she couldn’t tell whether he was talking or not.

The planet pulsed one last time in her sight, and then was replaced by bright padded walls and a large soundproof door. Abby was standing, watching the wall bounce off her body. She realised she was punching it rhythmically. Her fists sore but not bloody yet. The sides of her upper body covered in bruises from slamming into the wall. Blood on the floor that could only be hers.

The room was so silent. So horrifyingly silent. She understood that she had been in this room for hours if not days. She understood that this pain was not self-inflicted punishment, but stimulation in order to keep her brain occupied. To keep herself sane. On the floor, there were fragments of a plastic tray. The food had been licked off and then the tray smashed on the floor to fill the room with sound. She was hypnotised by the bouncing of the wall as she leaned in to punch the padding and was pushed back by the sheer force of her hitting. She felt the skin tear off her knuckles as she pushed through the pain and kept battering the wall. This wasn’t anger, or an attempt to escape, it was merely training. Merely a way of staying occupied.

Then she found her body giving up. She collapsed, sitting on the ground of the room. Staring at the ceiling of solitary confinement.

It was a memory, her movements now were not her choice. She couldn’t even choose where to look. She stared at the brightly lit white wall. Her eyes could see every stitch, every scratch and every imperfection. She could see where her nails had picked at the stitching to uncover the foam under the material. The obscenities she had written in an alphabet she knew she couldn’t consciously understand but her past mind translated it for her. “Fuck this.”

The thing about flashbacks, if this was one, is that they usually are active and short. This one was neither. Abby felt the slowness of the hour and the aching pain in her body. She knew without any doubt that she had not spoken to a soul in weeks. Her world was torture. Every second she experienced in her chamber felt years long. She wondered if this had happened to her. She wondered who had put her in a room alone with large opaque doors and what eyes had watched her pulverize her skin into blood and bruises to simply stay sane.

After hours of solitary had passed in her mind, she woke up seconds later to Khan still talking.

“Long story short, that’s why I banned lollipops in the army,” Khan was saying to the laughing augments.

Abbadon stood up and dusted herself off, using the movement to hide her shivering. “Don’t you fuckers all have somewhere to be?” she asked, waving them away.

The men chuckled and threw their bowls and sporks in a pile before marching off to work.

“Memory?” asked Khan as the group melted away.

Abbadon gritted her teeth. “Yeah.” She glanced down at the small white scars on her knuckles she hadn’t noticed before.

“Of sol confinement?” he asked, following her gaze. 

She shrugged. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?”


End file.
